The secret of “it arose in [His] thought to create”- it is alluded to here in the beginning of the Torah and the outset of the order of letters that the word create (bara’) connotes image (siyyur)… this is not to say that it is in something real or in nothing, but rather it is something that comes forth from nothing but has not yet attained [a state of] being, like an image on the wall. Thus it is the way of people to say, “I have formed an image of something in my thought.”

Translated by Elliot Wolfson in Through a Speculum that Shines- Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism, Princeton- Princeton University Press, 1994.